Son[i]a

Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.

Luz Pichel is a poet. Her writing comes out of all those places and even others that she did not physically visit but reached through curiosity, imagination, and empathy. The tension between major and minor languages, the liberating potential of a non-stabilised and nob-folklorising use of dialect and the crack of invention opened up by memory and childhood, are some of the paths that her poetry explores. 

Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns our gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.

DeForrest Brown’s work includes music released under the moniker Speaker Music, but largely revolves around research and writing. He looks back at the complex roots of black American culture and at phenomena like techno, in order to expose this systematic obliteration. And above all, to draw attention to the neglected creativity of its pioneers and the rich sonic universe they created from the rubble of a crumbling Detroit. Against the tide of the prevailing narrative, Brown’s work seeks to contextualize these episodes by highlighting key economic and political factors of the time, intertwined with personal anecdotes and a sincere love for the music.  We talk to Deforrest Brown about Detroit veterans, broken futures, Reaganomics, screams, government sanctioned murder, and Disco Demolition in the post-truth era.

Antonia Baehr’s works explore the fiction of the everyday and of the theatre, among other themes. That’s how her official bio at the time of writing this starts. But it does not fully convey the level of meticulousness that goes into her performances in order to emphasise every little aspect of the area between everyday life and the theatre. We talk to Antonia Baehr about switching roles, about her strategies for collaboration, some of her alter egos, gender stereotypes, and much, much more. Prepare for a bumpy ride that will take you from scores and Fluxus, to imitation, fetishism, and socks, by way of drag kings, drag queens, S&M, contracts, and even telepathic connections.

Writer, researcher and curator Maite Garbayo-Maeztu talks about writing, motherhood and low-intensity abandonment. She examines the aesthetic materiality of bodies and brings up quotations as gestures by which one becomes intertwined with those who came before, like acts of loving alignment. The ideas that emerge from the conversation include the notion of incalculability—the new that emerges between corporalities, like a gift for those whose practice allows for unexpected, totally unplanned, ways of politically enlivening the things around them.   

In our second conversation with founding director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman, we explore further the nuances of their sophisticated research practice, this time focusing on the notions of time and duration from a forensic perspective in order to unfold multiple temporalities from an instant. In doing so, Weizman explains how to build a case for public truth using clouds, architecture, metadata, shadows, testimonies, and surveillance and satellite imagery. 

Peter Blasser is a designer of electronic instruments and one-of-a-kind in the world of synthesizer builders. His circuit designs catalyse philosophical concepts in the form of whimsical analog synthesizers that have been evolving since he started his company, Ciat-Lonbarde, in Baltimore more than 15 years ago. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and meditates on his view on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and reflects on his views on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. He invokes elements such as wood, sunlight, wind, touch and craft in the process.

Violeta Ospina is an artist, an educator, and a facilitator of collaborative projects that pay special attention to sound and the body. Using typical expressions and imaginaries of popular celebrations as raw materials, her work unfolds through multiform devices that seek to intensify the present. Piñatas, scale models, processions, karaoke, carnival, and cabaret all make an appearance in her practice as catalysts for violence and tenderness, which can also awaken the parodic potential that is always latent in everyday situations. Violeta is co-founder of Radio Cava-ret, a project linked to listening and theatricality, which, taking up the baton from the Futurists, calls itself a “radia”: the experimental and erotic flip side of traditional radio.

Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In this podcast, we hear Charles Bernstein think aloud about the performativity of poetry and the multiplicity of voice, elaborating on questions such as the sound of writing, presence and absence, orality, aurality and a/orality. Along the way, Bernstein recounts his first textual experience and acknowledges the influence of Artaud, Bob Wilson and the Living Theatre in shaping him as a poet. We also revisit the early discussions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E constellation, their policy of exchanging poems and essays by setting up horizontal cultural mechanisms, and a collaborative effort to reread poets from past decades in order to write an alternative, non-hegemonic history of American poetry.